


But Then Face to Face

by eelia_faustus



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, Gen, M/M, Manga Spoilers, dream fic, post chapter 84
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-21
Updated: 2018-02-21
Packaged: 2019-03-22 06:17:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13758060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eelia_faustus/pseuds/eelia_faustus
Summary: “I’m dreaming, am I not?” said Levi.“It could be so,” answered the voice he was expecting to hear.An oneiric story about loss, coping and the eternal quest for meaning.





	But Then Face to Face

**Author's Note:**

> This is only my second attempt at fanfiction writing and my very first in the SnK fandom, and I’m still new to the specific dynamics of it. 
> 
> This work, though quite removed from the canonical setting, does draw directly from canon, and any omissions or variations from it are intentional for the purposes of the story. I intentionally avoided or muted the most plot-ridden elements of canon and went straight to sticking my finger in what I believe to be the living flesh of the whole thing.
> 
> This story was therefore written with intent, but I hope that it will be appreciated even by the reader who might just be looking for a good, readable SnK fanfiction.
> 
> Comments and criticism are highly appreciated; feel free to be brutal with them, though, please, not gratuitous. I’m just starting and I feel I have a lot to learn. 
> 
> English is not my first language and the work is unbetaed. Therefore, all mistakes are entirely mine.

1

The problem with most dreams is that one can never tell for certain whether one is dreaming or not, until one wakes.

There are dreams in which the conscience is completely unaware that it is dreaming, no matter how absurd the dream may be, nor the things that happen in it—for that is a judgement that comes with waking. What does matter is that, as long as the dream lasts, everything in it must appear not only plausible but absolutely real to the conscience. Ironically, these are the dreams that are most readily forgotten once we resurface in the waking world; we say, ‘it all felt so real!’, but the memory slips away already, and what had felt so real is nothing but a shadow. 

Then there are dreams in which the self is certain that it is dreaming—with joy or with terror. They say dreams are the subterranean exhalations of our mind, and that myths are the dreams of humanity—and our civilization has wonderful myths and dreadful myths also.

But between absolute unconsciousness and absolute awareness there are endless possibilities of combination, and one can never tell each time and for certain on which point of the spectrum one stands: how fleeting is the dreaming conscience!—and how much of its judgement belongs only to the moment of its return, when there is already the incontrovertible proof that we were dreaming indeed. 

It is most difficult to recover the exact impressions of a dream once we are awake; and that Levi had this ability, this cannot be said at all. 

Actually, dreams were none of his concern. Like many children, Levi too had been troubled by nightmares—and like those of very few others, his own drew strength from his life’s horrors, that crawled behind corners that his child’s eyes couldn’t yet penetrate. In the world in which he had been born there was no room for dreams—adults did not dream or if they did they never said a word about it, and this made children like him the best receptacle; his dreams were dreadful and recurring. 

Being alone to fight against his monsters, Levi had soon learnt to use the only weapon available—he ceased to trust what his nightmares showed him. He built an armour of diffidence and contempt against his dreams, and in the vehemence of childhood he made no distinction between the terrifying ones and the pleasant ones. Into adulthood, he brought with him a disregard for them; to dream was something that just happened and couldn’t be avoided, and that must be endured as one endures the pain of an old injury on rainy days. Levi had no time for dreams.

There had been a dream, though, that he had not been able to ignore, and with that one—much to his dismay—he ended up being obsessed. His armour was pierced through like it was smoke and the dream was standing before him, erect and solemn, demanding attention.

For a long time Levi would try in vain to recall exactly every impression, every fluctuation of his conscience as it had manifested itself in the dream, but all he could achieve was that his mind had ended up to rewrite its memory of it, transforming it into something that was deeply different, while the inner, original impressions drifted away undisturbed in a place that lay beyond his reach. 

But there had been a time in which the dream had taken place, an unrepeatable moment that had been present and concrete—although distant from the time of the world and of men; and if recalling it was not something within the possibilities of a narrator, many stories would not exist.

 

Later, Levi would often ask himself if he had been aware or not that he was dreaming. The answer is yes—and no. At first his conscience was heavy but alert; it was not cloudy, it was not confused. He knew—with a knowledge that held no sense of contradiction—that he was lying in a bed, judging by the feeling of linen over naked skin and of pillow under the head. Another thing he knew was that he had his eyes closed, for he could not see but he could summon the feeling that he could have, if only he opened his eyes. 

But was he aware that he was dreaming? He didn’t feel out of place; it was perfectly normal to him to find himself lying with his eyes closed in a bed with fresh linen. But a part of his conscience was tense and prickling, as if something was out of place but he could not detect what it was. He felt like one of those times when he had fallen asleep utterly spent back from an expedition, and when he woke up his body, for some moments that felt like an eternity, would not respond, still wrapped in the shroud of sleep and fatigue. But it was only a feeling, for now he knew that he could move without difficulty. He opened his eyes.

He was in a very large bedroom. A part of him dimly knew that he had never seen it before; in his whole life he had not even come close to a place that could contain a room like that one. Yet, the bigger part of him found the room to be perfectly legitimate, as legitimate was his being in it.

It was very large and very large was the bed, the linen white as the walls and the floor; white were the long curtains which screened the wide windows on the right. Against the wall across from the bed, a big wardrobe of light wood occupied the entire space, while on the left there was a single closed door beyond which talking voices could be barely heard. Levi could not catch what they were saying, but their murmur diffused a sense of calm and soft domesticity. The windows were open and let in a light breeze which swelled the curtains placidly and carried a penetrating smell with it, clean and briny. All around a sound could be heard such as Levi had never heard before—an ebb and flow of a sound, as if the Earth herself were breathing. 

But the predominant element was the light—a blinding light that entered from the windows and reflected over all that white and forced Levi to close his eyes again a few seconds after opening them. Only then he realised that his eyelids alone were not sufficient—the light was still blinding him. He pulled the sheets protectively over his head. Without opening his eyes again, he lay on his back, waiting. 

It was after a length of time he could not have measured that the door opened, but Levi did not dare to look at who or what had come inside for fear of being blinded again. An instant later he felt the sheets being turned down on the other side of the bed, and whoever had come into the room took the other half. 

Then came the scent. How do you explain the sense of familiarity that washes over you when you smell a scent that you actually don’t know? Levi could not know that scent—he had never smelt it before. He just recognised whose it was—he just knew. He could have recognised that scent everywhere, even in Hell. 

The other did not move; he was still, lying on his side of the bed, and Levi could not open his eyes to look at him.

“I—could you—could you dim the light a little?” said Levi with a hoarse voice from under the sheets.

The other kept still for an instant; then he got up and after a short while the blinding glow behind Levi’s eyelids dimmed to a soft darkness. The body and its scent were back in the bed. They both remained still for an indefinite amount of time.

“I am dreaming, am I not?” said Levi, and it was only then that his conscience truly considered the question. But for the whole duration of the dream Levi could not tell for certain—suspended between clarity and oblivion. 

“It could be so,” answered the voice Levi was expecting to hear, and he was suddenly caught by an inexplicable fear which stopped him from opening his eyes and looking at the face that he wanted to see more than anything. Countless questions flooded him; what would he see?—what did he want to see?—the eyes he would find looking into his would be dead, accusing, forgiving?—his face would be bloody, his body whole or mangled?—would his temple be soft and warm and pulsing or cold and eerily still? He didn’t want to know. What terrified him the most was the image of Erwin Smith—clean, sound, and finally at peace; serenity on that face was an idea so disconcerting that it filled Levi with a primal and unfathomable dread. He would not have been able to bear it.

But his body was limp under the sheets, and the jarring contrast between terror and the peace one feels when one finds himself in the very place where one wants to be most of all would be the only aspect of the dream that Levi would remember—pure and untainted. But he would forget the corporeality with which, when breathing in deeply, the sheet tried to fuse with his face and insinuate itself in his nose; he would forget the consistency of Erwin’s scent and the way it seemed to be the cornerstone of that world, the way everything was permeated by it, and the way it was what felt the most tangible and real—he would forget all this. He would forget the urge that gripped him to flee that place where he felt everything was at stake.

He bit his tongue. He felt nothing at all.

He said, “If this is a dream I want nothing to do with it. I don’t want to know why you are here. What could you tell me? Something fished from my own mind, I’m sure. I don’t want to hear it, Erwin. You are dead. This is ridiculous. I⸺it’s pointless for me to stay here. I should go.”

“Alright, Levi,” Erwin’s voice said. “If you want to go, you are free to do so. You can wake up now.”

But he said so with a devastating softness and Levi couldn’t. He did not move.

2

“Whose voices are those?” asked Levi.

“I wouldn’t know,” said Erwin. “Whose do you think they are?”

“I― Is it _them_? It’s them, isn’t it?”

“It could be. It would make sense, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes. Yes, it would.”

“Then it’s them, exactly how you remember them. Exactly how you want them to be, Levi.”

“I— I really should go.”

“Allright.”

Neither of them moved.

3

“Erwin,” Levi said. “May I ask you something?”

“Of course,” Erwin replied. “Anything you need, you may ask.” There was such tenderness in his voice that a deep anguish arose within Levi, and a yearning. 

Levi considered, then spoke, opting for openness. “Am I dying?” he asked.

“Dying? I wouldn’t say so, no,” came the candid reply. “I believe that you are merely asleep.”

“Oh,” said Levi, and added no more; though one could have perceived a shadow of disappointment in his voice, as if he could have gone on and add ‘pity’, which he did not do, for the largest part of him regarded it to be something too defeatist and selfish to say in front of someone who had respected him so much as Erwin had done, and to whom he as well had looked up almost reverently.

He would find out, eventually, what had evoked his vision. He would wake up—distressed and feverish—in a room that had nothing in common with the one from which he had been summoned back so abruptly, and in a bed that felt entirely different from the one he had been lying in just a fraction of time before. Reality would close back on him with such a force that its huge pressure would suffocate the feeble flick of his dream’s flame and the images evoked by it. But as every light leaves its impression suspended behind the eyelids of its beholder, the lingering figures of slumber excited his mind for a while longer, making him utter incoherent words and sound delirious. 

Yet, contrary to the dimension he had left, there would be human touch here, in the shape of hands so tender and caring and solicitous on his burning skin that Levi would think for a moment that he had drifted from a dream into another—until he would realise that those hands belonged to Hange, who was bending over him, trying to calm him and shush him back into the pillows. 

Though he had spent most of the time in the dream trying to cajole himself to come to reality, Levi would not be ready when that actually happened, and he would fight against his conscience to be admitted back. Thus, calling out Erwin’s name, he would soon slip into unconsciousness once more—this time, though, void and dreamless.

He would wake up again after an incalculable period of time being watched closely by a vigilant Hange. With his mind a bit more lucid he would be able, though with incredible effort, to speak more coherently, voicing the question that most of all he wanted answered. “What happened?” he would ask with a croaking voice. Bringing a cup of water to his lips so that he could drink, Hange would tell him how he had kept vigil for hours over Erwin’s body as if in a trance; how he had turned down food and water, and how—in a combination of exhaustion, deprivation and grief, ruthless on his already tried body—he had fallen into a nervous fever which had kept him between unconsciousness and delirium for four days, making them all fear for the worst. He had regained consciousness just a couple of hours earlier, during the night, and only shortly.

To his next question—how were the others doing—Hange would answer frankly. “Oh, well—we suffered the highest number of casualties on a single mission in the history of the Corps, we lost our Commander at the worst possible time, and with you knocked out in a bed no one knew whether you would rise again from,” Hange would tell him, counting on her fingers. “I’d say the morale hit an all-time low.”

“In other words,” Levi would say, “we are screwed.”

Hange would laugh at that and say, “Yes, but we have been worse all this time, haven’t we? We didn’t know, before.” And Levi wouldn’t answer at that. But Hange’s hand would not stop for a moment in their mission of wiping the sweat off Levi’s forehead and cooling his feverish skin, and he would welcome each and every touch in his starved heart with a sense of gratitude that his lips could nor would ever want to speak. 

“What happened to Erwin?” he would ask then, eyes fixed on the ceiling. 

To this Hange would answer more hesitantly—her voice would drop imperceptibly. “We built a pyre,” she would say, “the evening after you fell ill.” Then she would add falteringly, “I didn’t know whether you would make it through the night. For a while I feared we would have to burn you on it, too,” she would say with the rueful smile of one who remembers a dread still much alive in memory though now proven unfounded. Levi would look at her then, and he would be struck by the knowledge that Hange was the last person he had and that in all likelihood the contrary was true as well. He would have wanted to say, ‘Idiot, it’s not that bad,’; instead it would come to his dry lips, “Don’t think any less of me because of all this.”

Hange would rest her fingers on Levi’s cheek and would say, “On the contrary,” and then, after putting her hand in her pocket and getting something out of it that Levi couldn’t see at first, she would take his hand in both of hers and press the mysterious object in his palm. Opening his hand before his tired eyes, the green-blue glow of a stone hit by the morning light would light up his pupils, and Levi would be grateful that Hange had withdrawn her fingers from his face.

But it would be only later on that Levi would mention Erwin and his dream to Hange.

Some weeks would have elapsed from the morning of which we have told, and Levi would be slowly regaining his strength. That day, entering his room with food and tea, Hange would find him standing at the window. Levi would appear to her worn and tired still—the expectant and childish look in his wide eyes and a frailty about his half dressed body were the telling signs of his lingering illness and a long convalescence. With the morning light at his back, casting a halo around his figure but keeping his face in the dark, Levi would remind her of a spectre; but her practical spirit would soon bring her back to the task at hand. The moment Hange set the tray down on the bedside table, Levi would speak.

“I dreamt of him. When I was out. I dreamt of him,” he would say. Hange would not need to ask whom he was referring to.

“And—how was he?”

“I—don’t know. I didn’t see his face.”

“Did he say something to you?” 

Levi would merely nod, looking away.

“What did he say?” 

A look of indescribable misery would flick across Levi’s face and disappear. “I can’t remember exactly.”

“Oh,” Hange would say, and would fall silent—Erwin’s presence heavy and tangible over them. But Hange would smile knowingly to herself, because Erwin was a memory at one time inspiring and dear. 

Hange was always led by her spirit, as exuberant as it was reckless, which urged her to pursue doggedly anything that her instinct suggested her, and this was what made her a brilliant scientist. With people, however . . . 

Taking advantage of the fact that Levi was looking away, Hange would consider treading over slippery ground. Levi would detect behind the prolonged silence the hesitation of someone who is struggling with the eternal battle between saying and silence, and he would brace himself against the inevitable victory of the ‘saying’. 

Hange would say, “He was—very fond of you.” Then she would fall silent for a moment, weighing her next words. “No, fond is not the right word. God knows how unreadable a man Erwin was, but I saw him showing affection to the closest among his comrades—in his own way. Even to me. But you⸺ I’ve known Erwin for a long time. I’ve worked for him, I followed him in countless expeditions and I had grown an absolute trust in his ability to take the right decision in matters of field strategy,” Hange would say. “I think I can say that I knew him fairly well, as much as one can say to know a man like that. I never saw him take someone to his heart like he did you. And I would never have thought that it would be someone like you. You changed him,” she would say, “You kindled something in him that was not there before, or that was there but that he hadn’t visited for a long time.”

Levi would think, ‘I haven’t changed him enough,’ but say nothing. 

Hange had a personal aversion to being ignored which made her suddenly petulant and dangerously sharp. 

“Have you ever told him?” she would press, with the air of one who knows where to prod to get the right reaction from one’s subject of study. 

Levi would rouse himself then and would fix his gaze into Hange’s eyes, weighing her with the cautious and alert look of the prey before the predator. But his eyes would soon turn exhausted and Levi would shake his head, averting his eyes. 

“I guessed as much,” she would say, wearing a sad smile. “It wouldn’t be like you otherwise.” There would be no reproach in her words, but only a boundless affection—the strong and unconditional fondness that everything sees and that keeps everything quiet.

“I don’t think that he would have been against it,” she would go on. “I’ve often wondered whether you really were his strength . . . or if you rather were his weakness.”

“Hange. Please—don’t.”

They would remain silent while Levi ate. But as soon as Hange was about to leave, closing the door behind her, Levi—standing at the window and looking outside—would call her back.

“Hange.”

“Yes?”

“Would you help me remember?” Levi would say.

And Hange would not understand right away—and even if she had she could have pointed out that dreams were not her business, that there were far more pressing matters to consider. But Hange had only Levi’s wellbeing at heart, in that moment. 

“Of course,” she would answer, “Anything you need, Levi. Just ask and you’ll have it,” Hange would say, and with that she would leave. Levi would not turn his eyes from the world stretching outside the window.

Hange Zoë would keep her word.

4

One of the few aspects of the dream that would be preserved in Levi’s mind, and that he could therefore recall vividly, was the curious feeling that Erwin elicited in him—as if he were unequivocally Erwin, but with something in him that Erwin had never really shown in his life. It was a certain solemnity and an obscure wisdom that showed in his voice and in his words that made him seem at one time Erwin and not-Erwin.

Being accustomed to decipher the nuances of character and personality of men, Levi had managed, with time, to understand the different layers that composed Erwin’s nature—though knowing the character, however deeply, does not mean knowing the man, and Levi didn’t have any such claim.

The first impression Levi had had of Commander Smith was that of a ruthless manipulator who had honed the art of using his authority to his advantage. He was therefore very surprised when he noticed how easy it was for Smith to earn himself the scorn of his fellow men instead, and soon Levi would learn to know the Commander as the other members of the Scouting Legion knew him—a man who had irrevocably devoted his intellect, his acute perception and his extraordinary strategic abilities to a single cause. Like many men of his kind, Smith showed a certain seduction towards sacrifice, but as much as Levi had tried he could never find any solemn emphasis in him, and therefore could not hate him for it.

Smith was in every way a soldier, not a fanatic; he was a sober, composed man who saved his ardour and fervour for the battlefield and who never let his decisions and orders rest on the mere ideal; the ideal was ever present, but Smith never seemed to let it cloud his mind, and even though he was stern and even inscrutable, he never failed to exercise a certain appeal and an influence which invariably won him his men’s loyalty and respect, even their trust if not always their devotion. But one had the feeling, totally well founded, that Smith didn’t wish for personal devotion but rather to the Corps and to the cause.

The same qualities that made him respected if not loved by his men were those which made him disliked by a portion of the Military—who deemed him dangerous—and guilty in the eyes of the civilians, who were content with pouring on him and on what he represented their fears, their frustrations, and their pain. Smith could be easily considered a mystery as much as a devil.

But being Humanity's Strongest—as they wretchedly called him—Levi had ended up to be quite close to Commander Smith and soon he could be seen at his side—silent and scowling—during meetings and in the presence of the high-rankings, as during report-writing. He was soon made captain of a squad which members he could choose personally, he received orders first hand from Smith, and it was not infrequent that the two of them would discuss together some matter or another, until Levi found himself spending quite a lot of time privately with him in his office, and the air then was that which exists between comrades rather than that between a commander and his subordinate. Indeed, for some time now one could have found them together in Smith's office almost daily—even for just so much as sharing a cup of tea in companionable silence. 

So it had been a natural outcome that Levi had started to make acquaintance with Erwin the man—and thus Commander Smith had slowly drifted to the background.

It could be tempting to give in to the quite common idea that, in the company of the closest among his men and friends, Erwin would undergo a radical metamorphosis, as it often happens to men who make a public face of their unyielding side—but that wouldn’t be true. In private, Erwin maintained all of his seriousness and dignity, and his reserve hinted to an obstinate, self-inflicted solitude. Contrary to Levi, whose life in the Underground had taught that solitude equalled to certain death and who, though quite surly, showed a good heart and an inclination to loquacity, Erwin was taciturn, and whenever he could, he took the opportunity to give up his privilege of having the last word over anything of some importance. 

But there was a quality, as inexistent in Commander Smith as it was present in Erwin, that in itself could cast a completely different light over the latter compared to the former; it was his kindness.

When the commander had started to recede, giving way to the man, what a sight had presented itself to Levi’s eyes! And no one could have blamed him for the astonishment he felt in seeing that Erwin Smith—the very same man who sent his men to die and remained cold and imperturbable before the wives and mothers, husbands and fathers, sons and daughters of the same men fallen under his command—concealed a nature which was deeply good and kind, of a serious and phlegmatic kindness, whose only fault was considering his position incompatible to any show of pity or sympathy. Erwin had convinced himself that showing a stoicism and an indifference that he did not feel was his duty towards those he had necessarily afflicted, and—Levi thought—a sort of punishment that Erwin confusedly felt he must endure, thus condemning himself to be the first among those he had afflicted. 

There was a darkness in Erwin, and he could feel it. Levi had a feeling that Erwin had resigned himself to it but feared that it would cross his person’s confines and spread, poisoning what little good there was in their cramped world. But through his darkness, Erwin knew what sentiment and comradership were, and his had something tired and prostrate in it but it wasn’t any less strong. One could sense in him a benevolence and an openness, all wrapped in a silent hope for better times to come, and the promise of showing then the warmth that until then he had never allowed himself to overtly express.

Over Levi, who already felt bound to this man as a result of the upheaval he had brought in his life, the kindness emanating from Erwin had had an enormous influence; he knew very soon that he desired his closeness and his approval. Levi was overwhelmed by Erwin’s mystery—the gentle man and the harbinger of death—and was trapped in it like a sparrow.

In the dream, Erwin was still all wrapped in that mystery and that death, and both of them were exacerbated by the frustrated longing and regret which were in Levi. Thus, if the unexpected kindness had kindled in him his devotion, Erwin appeared now before him as if he were glorified by that goodness and mildness. He was a benign and calm being, whose shadows of doubt and uncertainty and torment which had oppressed him in life had dissipated, while Levi remained painfully immersed into the troubles of life. 

Though he was lying by his side in the bed, Erwin seemed to speak to Levi from an unbridgeable distance, and if something of whom he had been in life survived in this figure of dream, it emerged occasionally in his words, but always as if from behind a veil; the experience of death had sublimated his idealistic side, and through his words emerged an indulgence and an open solemnity which Levi would find hard to reconcile with Erwin—the man he had known and loved.

5

After Levi had mentioned the eventuality of his own death, Erwin had been silent for a long while.

Then, as if urged by Levi’s own mortality, he said softly, “I dreamt you had died, once.” Levi was very still and silent.

“I was outside the Walls and I had lost the others—they had left me behind. There were no Titans around and the air was still and electric. I couldn’t see anyone but I knew that somewhere there was a fight for life and death going on and I wanted to go to my men and be with them. In that moment I noticed a figure lying on the ground in front of me. And I saw it was you.

“You were lying broken at my feet,” said Erwin, “and I—I didn’t know how that had happened but you were dead at my feet, and it was final and real. I picked your body up and, oh—you were so light in my arms, just like a bird. In the dream I thought, ‘My Levi was a bird, with bones so light so he could fly above us all.’ I felt that I wished to surrender—to die, even—and the pain was so devastating that, long after, I kept asking myself how had it been possible that I hadn’t woken up immediately for it.

“But I didn’t wake up, and I saw that one of my men was coming towards me. I didn’t know his name, nor his face, and it was a rather curious face—I remember he had a strange look in his eyes, and something not quite human could be read on his face. The only thing I knew about him was that he was wearing our uniform. 

“He called me, and his voice sounded vaguely familiar. He called me again, and as I looked at him he pointed at your body, and chastened me saying, ‘Commander! Were you not ready to pay this little price and to accept it for the sake of all humanity?’ And I knew as I knew my own name that somewhere around me my men were dying by the score, and I could take them all, one by one, without shedding a single tear for their lives—but this very death made me furious with grief, and weeping I cried ‘No!’ against your neck, and I damned myself and demanded you were given back to me. 

“Because what would I care about the whole faceless humanity, compared to your life—real and close and—alive! What else would I care about, when I was holding you dead in my arms?

“But that man wasn’t leaving—he kept watching me with his cold and distant eyes. Those eyes held contempt against me, and had a cruelty in them, and he demanded that I told him how was it possible that I claimed the power to order others to make the sacrifice I was not able to bear myself. Did I know not that many others were standing like I stood in that moment, and many others had stood before—with sons and daughters in their arms, brothers and sisters, wives and husbands, friends and lovers? It was I who sent them to their death with my vision in their eyes and hearts, and surely I couldn’t disavow that vision for the sake of one single life?

“And I felt ashamed of me, then; but through the shame I felt that the soldier’s words were unjust and foolish, and when I spoke again, it was to say that your life’s worth, as that of each of my men’s, was not mine to gauge nor to sacrifice. I only had my own life to freely offer, and it was an insult to their sacrifice to say that those who lost their lives died on my order or in my name. My men died for something that was immortal. 

“The face of the man changed, then, and coming close to me, he placed a hand on me and said, ‘He who fears death in his heart and is ready to die is the most sacred among men. Would you deny your soldiers—would you deny him—what they were prepared to die for, only to give them a life as slaves of life itself? Can you, perhaps, choose to throw him back into the darkness you rescued him from—where the dark is worse than death for there is no peace at all, but misery and humiliation? Life is not yours to take, but it isn’t yours to spare either to the man who knows to be standing before death. Yet yours is the vision of freedom which gives him the choice to determine his fate, even if it were only to choose how to go into death.’

“I woke up with my answer still on my lips, and later that day you came into my office as always, and we said nothing. But there was a moment when you looked at me as you had looked at me before—as if showing me that you had chosen to be there at my side and asking me to make it a choice worth of not being regretted. 

“And never,” Erwin said, “never as much as in that moment had I wanted ever to break that trust, never had I longed so much for victory.”

Levi had remained silent and when Erwin had finished speaking, he said nothing. An image formed before his eye, and he thought confusedly to be back into a small, dingy room. Erwin’s body was lying on a bed.

Someone had covered his face with his mantle, so that the Wings of Freedom were all that could be seen of him, even in death. Now as then Levi thought, as if from a distance, that it all was ridiculous. Even back then he had wanted to laugh, and he wanted to laugh now and he could feel it in his throat—a broken, desperate laugh. The body had been composed in a salute—his left arm bended over the chest in a reversed salute. Levi had not been able to stop thinking, not even for a second, that it was Erwin, and his benumbed mind seemed curiously obsessed by the notion that he would move no more, and Levi kept fiddling with that thought as if it were a stone between his hands. 

His eyes had slid along the body until they had landed on the feet. They were naked; whomever had composed the body had taken the trouble to take the boots off, for they were filthy with mud and God knows what else, and they would have soiled the bed cover. Levi had felt like laughing again. 

It dawned on him then that he had never seen Erwin’s feet. They were beautiful feet—long and big, the arches soft. Levi thought stupidly that there was something in those feet which clearly told that they belonged to Erwin. He had wanted to touch them, but suddenly they were covered in mud and blood.

The room vanished and Levi was back in the bed beside Erwin. He was suddenly very aware that those feet were there, under the sheets with him, very close.

Levi saw Erwin walking towards the world, tracing a path for humanity with his naked feet. When he turned around his eyes were wide and very blue, and Levi ran to him and knelt before him, and with a cloth he wiped the mud and blood from his feet and kissed their wounds.

From under the sheets Levi thought, ‘So much for victory.’

He did not move.

6

Erwin was a great man, and as it is often the case with great men, his story was a tragedy. He carried his cross alone, but carried it with such dignity that one could barely detect the strain in his tired muscles. But every so often, a cloud would gather and loom over him, and his penetrating mind would draw inward to look into itself with ruthlessness.

Erwin became then the battlefield on which his own opposing forces fought one another, and he would bring himself before his own conscience’s tribunal, where he sat both as accused and prosecutor. His cross would fall, but he would cling to it, kneeling in the dust, and his eyes would look out seeking for a help he did not feel he had any right to ask at all. 

But soon his feet would find new purchase, and he would lift his cross back on his shoulders and resume the walk towards his Golgotha. After each fall he was slightly more tired than before, and so his glory grew.

Erwin had been a man of action in everybody’s eyes as much as he had been a man of doubt in the eyes of few—almost nobody. Levi, the man from the Underground who had his own underground within himself, knew the words of both very well, and even more the silences. To the silence of action, Levi answered with obedience and trust; but it was the silence of doubt that made a guide of him. He would kneel before Erwin then, and pledging his loyalty anew, he told Erwin his own ideal as one would describe a familiar landscape to a blind man who cannot see it anymore.

Levi would fall down on his knees before Erwin, and with wide eyes he would find himself believing things he did not believe, and he told them to Erwin with the devotion and fervour of a converted he was not.

But what brought him on the threshold of Erwin’s solitary inner temple was not the fear of seeing his hope’s flame go out; neither was it the promise Erwin embodied, nor his own seeking refuge from regret. 

Before Erwin’s torment, Levi would suddenly feel an ecstasy within himself, and a pulsing joy; his eyes would see with a new vision, and an acute hunger for the future would expand from his core. The morning showed a new direction and his hands longed to seize Erwin’s and lead him into that clarity. 

It was life itself—that unhoped-for yet immense force which soars again from the ashes of the pain of who stands before us. The sudden realisation of being still alive and the sense of possibility that came with it were what brought words of victory and devotion to Levi’s lips; and, as if they were water in a cup pressed to Erwin’s mouth, that mouth curled up in an imperceptible smile which ringed through Levi like a song.

7

When Erwin said he hadn’t wanted to fail him, Levi felt something clash in himself that he could not determine. He wanted to tell Erwin that he was wrong, that he couldn’t have failed him, not even if he had wanted to. But he couldn’t say so because he didn’t know yet.

Levi had thought himself able to resist the pain of death; it had struck him so many times that it couldn’t catch him off guard anymore, and Levi thought that the element of surprise was all that death had ever had against him. 

But Erwin’s death had not come as an invisible blow. It would spread in his body and mind like poison, slow and inexorable. Against this pain, Levi could use the only antidote he knew of; he had already started to envelop Erwin’s memory in a thick layer of resentment and bitterness. It was unjust, and untrue, but it was easier this way than to accept that the man he had respected the most in the whole world was dead, and that he had been left alone and without guidance.

Only a long time after would Levi be able to see beyond his own lies; he would search his memory in vain to find times in which Erwin had appeared to him wanting. He simply was not. Levi’s anguish, his own frustrations, the sense of aimlessness and impotence which sometimes would overcome him—they had never been directed against Erwin. 

But the Levi who knew all this was still a Levi-yet-to-come. In the dream, the poison was still running in his system and Levi was just starting to believe that he might have been let down. Yet the truth still lay near the surface in the fertile, wet soil of the mind, and the dream’s roots touched it briefly. For a moment, an awareness bloomed in Levi of something that he would fully understand only later, and before it withered again, to Erwin he answered, “Stop with your prattling. You never promised anything.”

“Oh, but I know,” said Erwin, “how could have I? The future is not ours to promise. Only the fools promise what they lack the power to determine—fools, or those who have nothing to lose themselves because they send others to carry out their duty. I hope not to have counted among the formers and I know I have always been too honest with myself to mingle with the latters. And the truth is I have always preferred to fight alongside with my men in the battles I sent them to—ready to die myself.”

‘And in fact you went and got yourself killed,’ Levi did not say, and that truth swelled and acquired a tangibility of its own and materialized itself into Erwin’s hard face. Levi could see him quite clearly—the absorbed look, his brow furrowed, the jaw contracted and his lips pressed into a thin, hard line behind his interlaced fingers, his elbows placed on the desk overflowing with papers before a mission—measuring his responsibility, betraying the irrepressible urge to give himself a reason for everything that could happen and would happen . . .

Suddenly, Levi longed to look at Erwin. It was an almost physical urge that with which he opened his eyes.

He was still lying on his back and he could only see the fabric of the sheet he had pulled over his face. Levi studied it for a couple of seconds, the way the fibres interlaced, but the moment was gone. He closed his eyes again.

‘You got yourself killed,’ Levi did not say; but it wasn’t lost on him the enormous relevance of precisely that fact to what Erwin was saying, if not the implications.

It could be deemed of some significance that he who many had thought to be Death’s right hand had also be the one who had given his own life on the field silently; but many had thought it fair, some hardly sufficient; Erwin himself could have unknowingly regarded it inevitable and necessary, while Levi would for a long time consider it a betrayal and, more obscurely, what had made Erwin honourable. Thus the intrinsic meaningfulness of that fact was lost on those who had the means to understand it.

That life calls in the instant, and it does not mind who will be there to answer, as long as someone does. Anybody could have answered the call which had brought Erwin to his death, and that task would have been carried out just the same, with the same efficacy. But it had been Erwin himself who had heard his own name spoken, and it had been him who had decided that that instant was his and his alone, and thus—in the final moment—germinated meaning where had always reigned the most extreme futility.

“No,” Erwin went on, “I never promised anything but my own devotion and a fight that was bound to be long and hard, and the outcome uncertain. Anyone who chose to follow me has had both, which makes me a man of word. 

“But inside I had to believe it was possible. I had to promise myself what I couldn’t know—that it was worth it, that it was right for my men and myself to give our lives away for a dream,” he said. And fell silent, as if considering whether it all had really been worth it.

Erwin said how it had always been that way. When he had only been a boy, Erwin knew suddenly that his own life and existence were not everything. Invisible forces seemed to be at work in the world and he thought he could feel obscurely that something mysterious and nameless was hiding behind everyone’s lives. It was something terrifying, and it coated everything in a dense, cold, suffocating mist. Erwin seemed to be the only one able to see it, and sometimes he had the terrible feeling that it was emanating from him. He looked odd and suspicious, and people around him ended up keeping him at a distance.

But this had been just one aspect of his new awareness. Beside it there was another, beautiful and fertile, which filled him with hope, and Erwin knew that it was what made him a man. He had told himself that, as long as he believed there was something more, as long as he kept himself ready to fight for that something if need be—even if he were the only one, Erwin had told himself that at least one man would still walk on earth.

Erwin said how, some time later, he knew that he need not be alone—that he could put his desire at the service of humanity. In the Survey Corps he knew other men like himself, in whom the flame of dream and purpose could be kindled. Erwin saw that he could instill his vision into men and make something great of it: deliverance, freedom. But the knowledge also came that the line between the necessity of sacrifice and blind idealism is thin, too thin, and with it came the resolve to step aside to someone more able if that line was ever crossed.

“But I wasn’t alone anymore,” said Erwin. “And so we went on—with too little men and too many deaths, but we went on. And as when I was a boy, I knew that this was mankind—this strain and this sacrifice—and as long as there was one single man ready to follow me, I would lead him.

“Then you came,” Erwin said, “but you were different from everybody else. You seemed to be born for this, you seemed to have it in your blood, but you were like an animal. And I—I had convinced everyone, but I was never able to fully make you see what I saw.

“Still, you followed me with unwavering dedication! While everyone demanded absolute clarity of me, and responsibility, and even guilt to make up for each death and each failure—you, who never seemed to truly see the necessity, nor the scope of our mission—you never asked anything! You seemed to be indifferent and blind to where I was leading you, but I had your unfaltering devotion nonetheless, as if you were so persuaded that every decision of mine would be invariably the right one! So now I ask you—have I failed you? Have I failed you, Levi?”

And Levi, misguided and lost, who could kill a Titan but here he was helpless, who was Humanity's Strongest as much as he was Humanity's Weakest; Levi the fool, who only knew retaliation to sorrow; he answered, “Yes. Yes, you have failed me.”

“Oh,” said Erwin. “This—pains me—immensely,” he said. And spoke no more.

Levi did not move.

8

From where he lay underneath the canopy of fresh linen, Levi felt his own hostility recede. He bit his lip and felt no pain. He lay still and awaiting.

He was confused; animosity had always been a clear-cut emotion, crystalline—it sparked in a flash and was manifested with purity and precision of intent. This sudden rancour against Erwin, on the contrary, was turbid and submerged him like murky water, and like water it made his limbs feel heavy and slow. The beast inside him wanted to reach for Erwin’s neck, but every time he moved his arm to press the knife against his throat, Levi felt the cold steel against his own skin. He would realise then that he would rather slit his own throat open, with his own hands, before he failed Erwin.

Regret filled him.

From the other side of the bed no sound came anymore, and the room was filled again only of the lulling breathing of the earth. Levi rolled on his side and with his hand he started feeling across the mattress slowly. Persuaded with dismay that Erwin was gone forever, he opened his eyes. 

Erwin was lying on his back. His skin, of a pristine pallor, emitted the faintest glow in the dim light. He too had pulled the sheets over his face which was thus shielded from Levi’s sight, who could only see the cut of his full lipped mouth, the length of his neck and his naked side.

Levi found himself caught between two conflicting impulses. He would have given everything to strip himself of all his grudge and reach over with his hand and touch and grab and claim and say, ‘I am alive and warm and for this night only, Death, you must give him back—for he belongs with me and I with him’, and his blood was throbbing with the force of his longing. But his lips were moving in a silent and fervent prayer to all the gods of slumber and wake who—please, please!—would let him go.

Hanging over Erwin’s lying profile, the sheets resembled a shroud, and ripples of a dull and nameless inquietude swelled in a mounting anguish that made Levi close his eyes again.

It wasn’t the fear of death that gripped him, or not entirely; rather, it was the obscure and inexplicable effect this particular death had on him—its denuding power from which Levi realised he could not defend himself. It was the fear that comes from the awakening of one’s own self-consciousness and from having one’s deep self ruthlessly brought to the surface; it was the fear, in equal measure, to both expose himself and to behold his own recesses so plainly.

Levi fought against his own words, for death was making him soft and reluctant but too prone to confession.

“I’m scared,” he said helplessly.

“Oh, Levi. It’s normal to be afraid.”

“No, be quiet, let me— I don’t know what this is, but I feel like I could— Never mind,” Levi said and fell silent. 

After a moment, he went on, “I am scared; but then I think—the worst has already happened, so what is there to be afraid of?” he said. “But what am I supposed to do, now? I mean—what could I possibly—”

“You will continue to do what you have been doing ‘till now,” Erwin said. “You will continue to fight because that is what must be done, and you know it—because you have seen too many things, and lived through as many, and you cannot possibly turn your back on the things you know,” he said. “Do not go down that path, Levi. Do not start second-guessing yourself. Do not start doubting. When you start to doubt and regret—that is when no option is left for you but to die,” Erwin said.

He was right, of course. Levi knew that Erwin was right, and that infuriated him. And what was even more infuriating was that Erwin knew that Levi knew he was right.

“You don’t understand,” Levi started, but Erwin cut him off. 

“Yes, I do,” he said. “It's because of me, isn’t it?” Levi remained silent, so he went on, “I am hardly relevant,” he said. “All of this—the Scouting Legion, all that we did and all that we sacrificed—it’s not about me. It was never about me. I do not matter at all,” said Erwin.

“How can you say that! After all that has happened!” Levi snarled.

“No! Listen to me. Can’t you see—can’t you see there is so much more at stake? You know that, you do—you must know. I know that you have started to see it, too,” Erwin said. “The crack in the Walls—the possibility, the hope—”

“You know what,” Levi said. “No—no, I don’t see it. If you can say to me that it didn’t matter— It was all that mattered—that it was you,” he said. “Do you really think that even half of the things the Corps did could have been possible if not for you? Tell me—do you really believe that? I’ll tell you— _I_ haven’t started to see shit—that’s the point. But I was content with following you, because it was you. But you were right before—I never could see whatever shit was it that you saw!” Levi said, “I thought that I would understand, with time. But then you— And I—”

“Levi,” Erwin called his name.

“No! Shut up—shut up! I don’t want to hear your shit,” Levi cried. “I knew that it was pointless to listen to you in this—what the fuck is this anyway? I’m done with you. You are dead. I have to go.”

But neither of them moved.

9

He felt exhausted. As much as he struggled, the dream kept bringing him back there—at the cradle of himself.

In that suspended world, made of sheets and dimness, it felt like receding into his mother’s womb from which one day he had come out. How would it be, he asked himself, to make himself very small and to crawl back into that warm darkness, and to float undisturbed in the safety of that liquid world until everybody had forgotten his existence—until he himself had forgotten. And only then to be born again, completely new.

But his birth wasn’t something that could be re-experienced, and it was the prelude to another event, set into the unknown of time but not less certain. In that moment Levi knew, with a clarity he had never felt before, that he must die one day. 

Was he resentful? He wondered whether death was really so intolerable and terrible, or whether he had been wrong—whether it was rather the last and ultimate solace.

Erwin was dead; but he was there with him—in that place, in that peace. If death had this face—why resisting her a little bit longer? The amniotic stillness of that place seemed to suggest him that there was indeed no reason at all. However, it did so in a language Levi could not decipher.

“What is this—breathing sound?” he asked quietly, and his voice was sleepy and remote, like the one of someone who is drifting into slumber but resists sleep by talking.

“It is the ocean,” said Erwin in a low voice. 

“Is that so—the ocean . . . ” Levi said.

“Yes.”

“How does it look like?” asked Levi. He thought he remembered vaguely hearing someone talk about the ocean.

“Well,” Erwin hesitated, as if searching for quite the right words, not only to describe it, but to convey its enormity to Levi. 

“It is like when you go outside,” he said finally, “but instead of grass you have water—an immense expanse of water stretching into infinity,” he said.

“Hmm,” murmured Levi. “And no Titans?”

“And no Titans.”

“I can’t quite imagine it,” said Levi.

Suddenly he was very conscious of the sound of Erwin’s breath—how he held it before speaking. The sound went straight into Levi’s insides like a spear.

“It is like—it is like when you make your bed with fresh sheets. When you throw them in the air over the bed and they swell into a great wave,” Erwin said. “Only it’s much bigger. And the waves come to the shore in a spray of white foam and they roll over the sand.”

“Like fresh linen . . . ” murmured Levi.

“Yes,” said Erwin. “Only, they smell different.”

“How so?” said Levi. He longed for sleep. 

“Can’t you smell it?”

Levi did not say that all he could smell was Erwin’s scent; nor how or why he was so sure that that fragile world would crumble to smithereens if the scent disappeared, like the arch without its keystone—for he couldn’t quite explain it to himself, either.

“No,” he replied simply.

“Oh,” said Erwin. “It smells fresh and crisp, and salty.”

“How do you know all this?” Levi asked.

“One can see very many things from my perspective,” Erwin said softly.

Levi felt himself wither. And suddenly he felt a wave of sickness surging up in his throat, and his animosity and viciousness came back to burn in his veins.

Erwin disgusted him, and death disgusted him.

It didn’t come as a refusal to admit it—he had seen too much of it, in too many shapes, too closely to deny it stubbornly as a child. Death was a constant presence in Levi’s world, and an animality, a bestiality had generated in him, that stripped it of any trace of poetry. To die was a miserable, humiliating business.

Levi knew then that the womb wasn’t a place of quiet and solace to come back to; it was the very first, ferocious battlefield—a place of struggle and fight for life; not for sacrifice—for bare, throbbing life, against which every ideal shatters.

Levi looked within him and found himself full of death. In the last few years he had seen so much of it that he was almost inured to it—as if dying were the most normal thing—and inside, when he wasn’t miserable and crushed, he felt empty and numb, when it should have been life, life—that terrible, terrible goddess—to guide his hand.

His first impulse was to seek for a cause, like a wounded animal would do. And he knew, or pretended to believe, that the cause lay with Erwin and his infatuation for sacrifice with which he had bought his loyalty.

There were many things, many indeed, that Levi couldn’t understand—and when he couldn’t understand something, he would set himself to find the means to understand, as if stubbornness itself were a guarantee of drawing answers out of things—and when he couldn’t understand at all, his mind would flood with questions, with which he both tormented himself and defended himself from the torment, wielding them like a weapon.

Levi didn’t understand Erwin—he couldn’t; and since he couldn’t—since Erwin was beyond his reach, he started to ask himself ferocious and desperate questions which concealed as many accusations that to him felt legitimate and incontrovertible by the sole fact that Erwin could not answer them.

With every life going out, for the man who was dying everything ceased to be, but from the soldier the last and terrible renunciation was wrenched by those who kept on living. Who was Erwin to demand such a sacrifice—in the name of what could he bring a man to surrender his most treasured possession? Was he a god? Had he thought himself one?

Now Erwin was an _ecce homo_ , broken and bloody, and Levi held the whip and the spear to torment him, while he saved the crown of thorns for himself. For how could have it happened that he had let himself take death lightly?

Levi tried to strain his mind into the depths of death, but such a void, such nothingness dwelled there that it was inconceivable—his mind kept rising up against it; it was crushing and it terrified him. How had he come to be the hand of a man who had guided so many into that abyss of no return? And for what, for what did they give their lives? Why would a man persist in defending some bare ideals that hold any value only as long as there was someone to perpetrate them—when them all were bound to extinction! Why, among all the men who had been willing, it was him who had been chosen to be called hero just because he had managed to survive only a little longer?

Thus Levi asked himself, and he could see himself, standing tall on the naked face of earth, as his words smouldered on his tongue, unspoken. And it didn’t matter that he was full of contradictions; he didn’t need sensible questions, as he didn’t want answers. On the contrary, his questions served better as accusations as long as they remained unanswered. They were a battlement in defence of himself, and they generated resentment to be used as poison for his arrows; this was all that Levi wanted and all that he needed.

But though he was in a world of his own creation, it didn’t abide by his needs, nor his will. 

The dream betrayed Levi. Nothing could be done to prevent him from sharpening his own arrows, but it was denied him the rope with which he wanted to bind Erwin to the column.

“What are you saying, Levi—you don’t know what you ask.”

The voice was calm, but Levi quaked and knew that Erwin could see within him. His eyes were blue and terrible, and they were searching Levi’s thoughts—bare and desolate—and there was no place at all where they could not reach them.

Erwin could have struck Levi, but he did not. He remained silent, like an angry and disappointed father who doesn’t grant the son the dignity of punishment. Levi tried to defend himself, “Don’t I now? Maybe. But you don’t know what you asked of us all, and those who have died for you.”

“Died for— Levi! Don’t talk about death as if you knew it. You don’t know what you are saying.”

“And don’t you talk about life as if you knew it—you don’t know what it is!”

Erwin fell silent for a while, then went on calmly, “You think it’s all for nothing, don’t you? It is desperate, it’s true, but Levi, a desperate action is not pointless only because it is desperate—not when it is the only chance one has to say, ‘Here I am! I exist and I am a man, and I live!’”.

“‘I live!’, Erwin—‘I live!’. They don’t live anymore, can’t you see? It is pointless because there is no hope in it! There is no going back—it’s over, Erwin. And you robbed them of their only chance. My God! It was their only chance!”

Levi was panting, and when Erwin spoke again there was a meek sadness in his words.

“They gave it freely. They had the right to give their life freely; and they had few other liberties, maybe none. Would you have robbed them of that right? Consider if you really want to go down this path, and be careful—you wouldn’t have been very different from what you think I am now.”

“Not everyone was free,” said Levi in a whisper.

And Erwin said, “A soldier is the most holy of all humans because he is the most tested. To him belongs the sad dignity of being necessary in the light of all the failures and frailties of men. The humilities are piled on a soldier in order that he may, when the time comes, be not too resentful of the final humility—that of a meaningless and dirty death. And oh—death is terrible, it really is. Everything pales when confronted with it, and if a man could really imagine himself on the point of dying, he would realise that he could give up everything just to be granted the chance to live an instant longer; no ideal, no ambition, no heroic streak will hold. Death is ruthless—it admits no poetry; and every death will always seem meaningless.

“But, even though that for which you die will not sweeten your own dying, it may make your death more bearable for those who will outlive you, and it will plant in the hearts of those who live the seeds of truth and freedom. And someone may follow you in death, and water with his blood the soil that welcomes those seeds—so that one day there may be someone who will eat the fruits of your sacrifice.”

Levi tried to speak, but his mouth felt full of sand—his heavy tongue rasped against the roof. He tried and failed and tried again. 

“Would you say that your death has meant something?” he said in what he hoped was a mocking tone, but only came out as a croaking sound from his dry throat. Levi had wanted to say, ‘I wish I could give back your ideal a thousand times and have you with me again—I don’t give a damn about seeds and fruits.’

He could not see him, and Levi couldn’t have told if what he heard in Erwin’s voice were tears or a smile.

“I wouldn’t really know, my friend. It is not my evaluation to make, I’m afraid. And I know that it is a miserable and cruel judgment to leave to those who remain. But don’t think, Levi, that those who cling to life with all their might value it the most against those who surrender it; they don’t know, or know it resentfully, that when everything is over for them the world keeps going on and things will go on existing even without them.

“But he who is prepared to die honours life most of all, because he cannot help to think that it is larger than him, and even before its apparently inconciliable and recurrent senselessness, he refuses to give it limits only because his own eyes won’t be able to see beyond his own time.”

Erwin seemed to lose all his greatness then, and added, “Maybe the only reason why I speak so is that I participate more than most in the universal need to find meaning in our existence, and particularly in our personal tragedies—but, you see, life has done everything in its power to prove me wrong, and yet here I am—speaking words of hope from the other side of the grave; and I can’t help thinking that this too must mean something.”

Erwin fell silent, and in the silence that followed his words Levi was again suddenly very aware of the voices coming from beyond the only door and which he could still not identify. Erwin had hinted that they be the voices of the dead and, if that was true, Levi thought bitterly that it must be rather crowded there. Of many of them he couldn’t even remember the face. 

He forced himself to try and believe in Erwin’s words and he realised he could not. He tried then to find in himself the fury he had felt before, but he only found the quenched ashes, lying in a hearth of remote and apathetic resignation.

There was only one fact, standing naked and incontrovertible in his mind: men died screaming and crying, or so weak that they lacked the strength for a last moan. Was it honouring them, to say that they died for an ideal that had no place on their lips while they devoted to it the last moments of a life they had believed to be infinitely longer? Or wasn’t it rather insulting to deny obstinately an humiliating and nameless death? And to recognise that it had been their choice to put their lives within reach of such a terrible end, did it do anything to mitigate the horror of it? 

Levi knew how it had been for many. A lad, moved by his own restlessness and thirst for adventure and for proving himself, enlists with the distant knowledge that he may die but without giving it much thought. No one really knows that one must die if only remotely, and even on the verge of death, one will believe one must live eternally still; those last moments will feel as if they must be endless. And who more than the young, standing on the brink of the grave that his body must fill tomorrow, would be ready to forget every glory and every truth, every dignity and every joy, only to be able to survive and even just exist? Because even the most lousy scrap of life would seem to him full of promise then, and even the most cruel of worlds becomes so beautiful in his eyes! 

But Levi had known such a life, and he knew in his heart that he had chosen the eventuality of the most painful death against an existence of a man buried alive, and what had guided him outside his grave was not at all different from what had made Erwin follow his men into death. Levi had been moulded shrewd and cautious by life, but he had been made childish again by the thrill of the world and of its lethal and obscure beauty.

And Erwin had been all this to him—he was every possibility that crowds the mind; he was the race into clean air and the dignity of the man that knows no chains; he was the humility of resignation and the wings given to the creatures that crawl in the dust; he was the obscure terror that sharpens the senses before the unknown; he was—

“You have always been very persuasive with words,” said Levi. “People dropped at a flick of your tongue, or swore themselves ready to move mountains with their shaking limbs. But it was your silence that spoke loudest, and what kept you awake at night was what you did not say—when you shut your mouth.”

Erwin said, “I would never have fathomed that one day I would have to count you among my accusers, Levi. I see now that I must have wronged you terribly to have you speak to me as you do,” he said, and Levi was surprised to find an authentic sadness in his voice. “But I can tell you this,” he went on, “If you want to try and use my own crimes against myself, you must know that I have never considered guilt to be a particularly rewarding feeling. And if ever had I fallen prey to the need for retribution, or for atonement for my sins, then every walk back inside the Walls after an expedition would have been a sufficient punishment to my erring soul, I can assure you—and nothing of what you feel you have to tell me will ever be comparable to those walks of shame. And I am grateful—or I wouldn’t have survived long—I am grateful that I never was the kind of man so self-centred as to attribute himself more burdens than those that are due, out of some morbid quest for martyrdom.”

Contrary to Erwin, who had been an acute strategist, Levi was a fighter. He noticed immediately that, in defending himself, Erwin had exposed his weakness, which Levi knew very well; he had seen it countless of times and he had been the one to defend it, but this time he struck purposefully.

“Is that so? I remember a different story altogether,” he said with affected indifference. “When we were alone and you knew you didn’t need to bullshit anyone, you never stopped babbling about the hell where you were going to pay for the deaths of your men, that you felt you had caused. Don’t think I don’t know all about it—your ghosts surely are more numerous, but they are not so different from those of the rest of us. You didn’t seek martyrdom, you say? Was it not you, who thought that the loss of his own fucking arm wasn’t enough? Aren’t you the dead one, between us?” said Levi, and he felt calm and cold. 

Erwin said, “But you seem to forget, Levi, that I was human. It was my doubts that kept me so, and the grief I felt for the necessity of my position, of which, however, I’ve never backed out and which I have never used as a cheap way to surround myself in an air of solemnity and tragedy. But I was human; what kind of creature would I have become if I had prevented my doubt to speak? A pure and unwavering ideal belongs to prophets or to monsters, and they are both alone and hunted. Who would have followed me if I had been the one or the other? Still, I have never let my doubt distract me from my duty, which I’ve always felt I had towards men because I was a man, too; but that it would be you, of all people, to forget . . .”

Levi had not forgotten. He had kept hidden in his depths his pride for his gift of being able to tell the man from the commander; to do so, he must be able to see the man in the first place—his doubtful side full of torment. Levi knew it, knew it well even if he couldn’t understand it fully, and felt close to it and had often felt the pull to preserve it. He knew it, for it had given him the sweet power of inflicting pain or dispense alleviation. He had never abused it, and this knowledge had given him more pleasure than the power itself.

But Erwin was a troublesome figure, and this too Levi knew; he was a difficult man to follow and an even more difficult man to love, and too easy was to call him a devil instead; his name seemed made to be uttered through gritted teeth, and Erwin seemed to accept it with disarming dignity. Levi himself had sometimes given in to the temptation of regarding him inhuman.

“I was a man,” Erwin went on, “and this may very well be the answer to many of your questions. And I have always been on life’s side—you are proof of as much.”

“Me?”

Erwin was silent for a while, as if weighing his words; then he said, “I knew it immediately—since the first time I lay my eyes on you, I had wanted you with me. Since the first time I saw you, I couldn’t help but envision all the things I could have accomplished if I could have you by my side. ‘Imagine,’ I had told myself, ‘all the things that you would be able to do if you could take this vile man, this scum—if you made him a soldier, freed him from his prison, made him see what you see; if you could make him trust you and fight for you—imagine!’

“And I did: like a messiah, distant and remote, I made you my best soldier—obedient and devoted to your commander. Like a messiah—there was only the naked ideal in me then. But no god had chosen me; the fight was long and the end uncertain, and like the man I was I too needed something to fight for, which was maybe less grand but warm and alive—or better for it.”

Erwin stopped and even if Levi could not see him—for he still kept his eyes obstinately closed—he knew that he was being observed. He trembled and turned his face away.

Erwin went on, “I don’t know how it happened but I was taken by the neck and shaken by the knowledge that suddenly my ideal had a body which needed my cloak so that I could cover it, and a face. Without realising it, I had already done for you what I wished for all humanity, and what I had felt as an imposition and a mission to carry out cold-heartedly and imperturbably it was a choice instead, and a path that I could walk as a man—in the shadow of error, yes, but with the ardour and the devotion that belong to a man.

“I changed, Levi, and I started to feel inside of me the wish to be a good commander for you, too, and not to fail you, and the final victory seemed more beautiful and wonderful than ever before, now that I had someone to give it to.”

Levi was silent, his face turned away from Erwin. He did not say how barren and cold such a victory felt to him now, and how bitter an aftertaste it left on his tongue. If he had expressed as much, he probably would have known from Erwin’s lips that his was a riper and richer victory than what Levi had imagined. It was made of land as far as the eye could see and of its riches; of labour, and of the plain and simple sweat with which a new world is built, of things that grow; then of children—many children born in the love for life and freedom. Erwin would have told him that he had hoped all this for Levi and that he had done everything in his power for Levi to have it.

But it remained untold, as it remained untold that all this would have held an appeal to Levi only as long as he could have enjoyed it with the very same man who had laid his own life to acquire precisely what that death had made immensely poorer in Levi’s eyes.

For such is the matter with sacrifice—that one is ready to give one’s own life precisely for those who would wish that least of all, paying the highest price to purchase their future happiness and fulfilment only to condemn them to misery, bereavement and loss.

Or is it? Couldn’t it be, instead, that the will to live Levi had mentioned was strongest, after all? Couldn’t it be that that was what he who had sacrificed himself had believed in most of all—what he had known all along? That life always has the last word over death, and as long as it lasts, its high and kindling flame shall overcome darkness, and its warm breath shall make the bud bloom again after every winter, no matter how frosty the latter has been.

 

They were silent, but their silence was electric, one in which the one could sense the other clearly. Levi’s conscience was bubbling, like a subterranean river seeking for a crack in the soil to overflow above. Both seemed like they wanted to say something, and one could tell by the cadence of their breathing; but Levi seemed obstinate in remaining silent, while Erwin was waiting for Levi to speak first.

Levi couldn’t get his mouth to work—not because he didn’t know what to say, but because he seemed not to know nor trust what would come out of his lips. He felt vulnerable and yielding, like the tender skin around a wound. The fever against which his real body was fighting in those hours without his knowledge took the shape of an obscure force that, inexorably and against his will, kept dragging him before Erwin in his helplessness. Levi knew that if he were to talk he would say everything—everything. 

It was Erwin who spoke first.

“I just now realised that I’ve never asked you something, Levi,” he said, “and I am grateful that you have brought me here with you. Now, I hope you will help me.” 

Levi did not answer; he flattened himself against his silence like a creature of the undergrowth, hoping not to be found. 

“You said before that not everyone had been free while following me,” Erwin said. “Were you talking about yourself?”

Levi did not answer.

“No—I know you weren’t talking about yourself. I gave you the choice. That’s why I would like to know form you, Levi—why did you stay?”

Levi was petrified. With the precision of a hound, Erwin had come to look for him right into his lair.

“Levi,” Erwin said, “I need you to tell me now.” And Levi knew he was lost.

If Levi had known and accepted the power of abandon and words, he could have told Erwin of his own gift for a resigned loyalty, absolute and unwavering—a true and almost instinctual yearning to offer his own devotion to someone who was worthy. 

If Levi had been a man used to deciphering himself and his own motives with honesty and sincerity, leaving aside every trace of mortification and self-loathing, as one would do with a dirty rag, he would have dredged his own dark waters without fear, and in the muddy riverbed he would have found the magnetism and ascendancy Erwin had over him, to which he abandoned himself with a fierce and unspeakable pleasure. 

Levi was like an animal kept in too long a captivity, who, once freed, is made drunk by the outer world but who, in his own intoxication, runs in circles and goes back searching the hand that freed him. Levi knew this in his heart; at times he would look at himself and find himself intolerable and repugnant. A certain reluctance would seize him then, and an impulse to rebellion; but the devotion that goes with trust would always bring him back. Levi had wanted to tell Erwin of his own desire of being respected and loved.

If Levi had been able to, he would have told Erwin all this—but he was not.

He said instead, “I was a thug of the Underground, and you were nobody to me, nobody at all—just some military asshole come to stick his nose where he should not just to cause me trouble. You were nobody to me but a blackmailer and an objective like any other. I had seen many like you.

“But then, after⸺ suddenly you were the only known thing in my life, the only thing I had and knew. And I hated you. I could not hate you for their death, but I did anyway, for the place you had put me in. All my life I had longed to see the sunlight, and you brought me outside. I hated you for the death you brought with you, and for the life you brought, and even more so for it—because through it you were buying me. With my hopes and fresh air you were buying me, Erwin.”

A deep loathing of himself washed over him then, but he felt that if he had to damn himself with his own hands, then he would plunge himself right to the bottom of the lowest pit in hell. He said, “You said I was free, but who on earth would have turned your offer down? Who in their right mind would have crawled back into the mud below your nice cities to lick their wounds and to wait in the dark before slitting someone’s throat for a crust of bread? To you, it looked like you were raising me, but you were putting me in a place where I could only follow you or fall.

“I was mangled, ruined; you were holding my life in your hands, and you crushed it with a word. Pathetic, you called me. I was there, in the mud, inconsolable and filthy, and I lashed at you like the beast that I was. But you tamed me. Do you remember what you told me that day? Do you remember, Erwin—you fucking bastard? I was yours then—you could have done anything of me, you could have made anything out of me—and you did. You made me precisely what you needed me to be, and there are no words—that I can speak—to say how grateful—how grateful⸺” his voice was convulsive. “And now that you heard it from me, leave me the hell alone. I’m tired.”

He fell silent; he could speak no more, and really he had told all he ever had in him.

“I remember,” said Erwin softly, “what I told you that day. I told you the greatest truth I had, my shield against the ghosts; I knew you would make good use of it. But first it was necessary to humiliate you, otherwise it would have been pointless to tell you what I wanted you to know—what was essential that you knew.

“Before a choice, no one can know what will happen, what the outcome will be. You can only choose what feels more right in the moment, and true courage lies in not regretting a choice because of its consequences—no matter how terrible—and never back out at the next crossroads. I told you that regret is despicable and that it numbs the mind, until you are left to die. Levi, this is still true—it will always be true. You have done so much—you did so well, my friend.”

But Levi wasn’t listening anymore.

The room turned into that blood-stained field, and Levi was back there, panting on the grass—then suddenly he was on a roof with two bodies lying in front of him. 

From that day, he had heeded to the advice; not only heeded—he had abided by it like it was law, and he had made himself a walking temple of its truth. Never regret a choice you made because of the outcome—never back out of yourself. But this one choice he had made—he regretted it, and it pained him so that it had to be this one, this very one, the one most linked to the man who had spoken his truth—that it had to be this one of all, the one doomed to be the only choice he would regret until his dying day. 

The fact is that he had thought they had time. How foolish of him—nobody really had time, and surely not in the Survey Corps. Yet, he had deluded himself that there was all the time in the world. That was the effect Erwin had on him: he could make you believe, without knowing how nor why, nor exactly what it was that you believed in. Levi had believed in Erwin; not in his cause, not in his foolish dream, but in the man. He had even forged himself as his weapon. And without him even realising, a thought had taken root, and he had started to believe with the strongest faith of all—habit—that they would win and both live to see that day. 

He had been wrong, and the consequence of that one poor-made choice lay there, beside him in that bed—unreachable, unfulfilled.

A terror, a panic unlike anything he had ever felt before seized him and crushed him then. It felt like Titan teeth and the pain that followed was so overwhelming that he wanted to double over the edge of the bed and retch. His soul felt chained to an endless and hopeless solitude, and hurting.

“I have to go,” he heaved. “I have to⸺”

“Alright,” said Erwin, and Levi wanted to flee, but his dream body, treacherous as it was, felt at peace. It ignored the conscience’s protestations and remained limp against the mattress.

“I have to go,” repeated Levi with less sentiment, weakly trying to coax the dream into relinquishing him. He wished vehemently that the sheets would rise like waters and drown him. But neither the bed nor the sheets moved—and neither did Levi.

10

When he spoke again, it was with resignation.

“I don’t know what I should do, Erwin,” he said.

He drew his tongue across his lips and caught the tip between his teeth. He felt only a shadow of pain, but it seemed sufficiently real.

“Ah, the time is almost up, then?” asked Erwin, as if he had felt it himself.

“We had enough of it. But what am I supposed to do? Soon I will be out there again and—Erwin; the world will be the same but to me it will be completely different and no one will know . . . ”

“Hange,” said Erwin.

“What?”

“Hange will know. Levi, I cannot give you the answers you seek. You said it yourself at the beginning—I am the product of your conscience; I can only say what you have in you already.” 

Erwin went on, “but you can start with the right questions. If you ask yourself what you die for, you will never find an answer—not an honest one, anyway. Ask yourself what do you live for, instead; and if the answer happens to be something for which you’ll have to fight, something for which you’ll have to accept the possibility that you may in fact die—then, you see, there’s all the difference in the world.”

“You were always good with words,” said Levi.

“Oh, but you know me so well.”

“No,” Levi said, and there was a gravity in his words. “No, on the contrary. That’s why you weren’t allowed to leave me here.”

To these words, Erwin seemed to redescend into his doubt, and through it into the man he had been—the one that longed for Levi’s understanding like a thirsty man longs for water—and said, “I am—deeply sorry, Levi.”

Levi felt that Erwin was near, nearer than ever; he was everywhere and inside him, he filled him like a cup. But he seemed to come across from a sidereal distance. Levi was struck by the truth of his own words; he didn’t know Erwin at all—he was still his mystery, and that Levi had seen his last breath leave his lips, it meant nothing; it only made him even more bewildering and unreachable.

“But I had to,” Erwin said. “Can you see that? I didn’t want to die, Levi, but I had to. Can you see? Forgive me. Can you see? Levi, forgive me.”

He saw him falling against the sky with his immense wings; his temples alight with a halo of sun, before they extinguished themselves against the crest of an endless expanse of water. But he had touched the sun, and with his feathers he had built wings for the creatures of the dust. 

“Of course,” Levi would tell himself much, much later, remembering these words. “You had made me the carrier of your own will; you had made me the instrument of your dream, and to be a good instrument, I must know. It is because I knew that you had deluded yourself into believing you had to die, and that you were certain of it—it is because I knew this that I didn’t try to save you as I held your life in my hands.”

But in the dream he said nothing. He was silent long enough to let Erwin know he had heard him and then said, “Erwin, I’ve always followed your orders, and I hope I never gave you a reason to feel disappointed with me; but I’ve always let you be the one to deal with the questions. Now it is different—there has always been a great deal of absurdity in our world, but the one I will wake up in will have a new futility in it, and how should I continue to do the things I did before?” he said.

Erwin seemed to think for a while before he spoke. “Imagine a man,” he said quietly, “to whom is told that there is no God, no higher force in the universe; imagine that he is told that there will be no reward, no greater scheme of things against which to evaluate his own actions, and that everything will determine itself in the very moment of its existence and that this will be like the sound of a stone dropping where no one hears it.

“Imagine this man taking his head in his hands and despairing, but then standing up and crying, ‘I love my fate! So be it, if so it must be!’, and then imagine him doing exactly what he was doing before, and that he does it now only because it is right in itself and because the things he can do may bring joy and freedom to him and other men precisely where they are given their only chance. What would you call this man?”

“A fool,” Levi said.

“You disappoint me, Levi; and you are a terrible liar”

“What would you call him, then?”

“A masterpiece; for wouldn’t he be better than a god? He would be the same man, weak and flawed and bound to destruction, but he would have gained for himself the dignity of the choice and the possibility to trace a path to lead other weak and flawed men like him, and his end wouldn’t be in solitude anymore, but beautiful and full of goodness because it would be brightened by the flame of his choice.” Erwin’s voice was a song of triumph.

“You had that too, you know?” he said then. “The desire—what no man, not even the most miserable, can’t help but have—the pull and the yearning. You had that too, it was in your eyes. You were calling me; I saw and answered your call.”

“So then,” Levi said, “imagine I were kneeling in the mud in front of you, again. What would you tell me to persuade me into following you this time?”

“This time I wouldn’t tell you anything,” said Erwin. “You would be free to go or stay—as you have always been.”

“Bullshit,” said Levi; but there was a secret smile playing upon his lips, for he was starting to understand. And he knew then that he would exercise his choice.

“I believe this is the great reward,” Erwin said. “Maybe this is the only reward. Maybe this is the final purity all ringed with filth.” 

“But you are dead,” said Levi softly; his tone made it sound like a declaration of love. ‘Does it hurt, to die?’ he thought convulsively. 

“Yes, I am dead, and the only thing I regret is that I will never see you fly again,” Erwin said. “But you are alive—you can still make your choice. Death is inevitable, but life is inevitable also, once we receive it. Not everyone can have a meaningful death—it is not in our power to decide, or very rarely and it is never a happy decision. But a meaningful _life_? We can always choose to lead one. I would say we are called to do so.”

“I will, if you wish that I would.”

“Levi, where does this come from?”

“I don’t know; I had it in me, somewhere.”

“I wish it. And—Levi?”

“What.”

“It doesn’t matter how it will happen—when you’ll die, it will never be pointlessly. Remember this, please,” said Erwin. “However will it happen, when it happens, it will be how you have lived up to that moment what matters, not the moment itself. Your death—it can never be pointless.” 

“You sure know where to strike, don’t you?” Levi said.

“Of course; I know you so well,” Erwin said.

“And here I thought you were going to reassure me, saying that you will be waiting for me in the beyond—that I would find you there when I cross the threshold—or some shit like that.”

“Well yes, that too, of course,” said Erwin.

“I should have expected as much, you sappy old man,” Levi said. “I love you,” he said.

“I love you, too,” said Erwin. “There simply was not the chance, was it? I had to learn how, but I loved you all the same; a silent kind of love, it was, but no less real,” he said.

They were silent. Levi’s tongue was hurting. Then— “Erwin.”

“Yes? What is it?”

“You will always be my own humanity’s victory,” said Levi; he felt like falling from a tower.

Erwin was silent, and then spoke softly.

“Will you not look at me?” he said.

Levi hesitated, trembling. He was afraid of the moment, it was too heavy, and as much as he had longed for this—as much as he had longed for this one chance—he couldn’t.

Then he felt Erwin’s hand come to his cheek. He had never touched him in the dream, not once—Levi would forget the touch of that hand. Suddenly, it was too much to bear. He took hold of the hand and pressed it over his eyes.

Levi wept into that palm, sobbing, “I have to go—I have to go—I can’t stay anymore⸺”

But he didn’t go yet. Not straight away. He stayed for a little while longer.

_For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face._

**Author's Note:**

> The title and the final quotation are from Corinthians 1 13:12.
> 
> “A soldier . . . dirty death” is an adapted quotation from John Steinbeck’s “East of Eden”, which I had been reading while revising this story and which, as I pleasantly discovered, delved into some of the key themes I had wanted to include here.
> 
> “This is . . . with filth” is a quotation from “East of Eden” also.
> 
>  
> 
> Thank you for reading!


End file.
